User blog:XenWithAPen/Spite is your Friend
From my Patreon : When it comes to creativity, spite can be a great tool in your arsenal! The best things that anybody can create artistically speaking comes from great emotion. With that said, when you're feeling angry and spiteful or resentful you can use that emotion and energy in a positive way by creating something you can enjoy out of it. Let me give you an example. I recently had a player severely burn the bridge of our friendship, and it was clear to me I would never run a game for him again. This player had a unique character concept that wouldn't normally work in my setting, but I try to be very accommodating and so I worked with him to flesh out his backstory and give names to the places he had been. I had made a race write-up unique to his character only, I had spent time researching the forgotten realms to see where I could place his home, I fleshed out an old excerpt of information on a settlement, and I even went as far as to create a heraldry for his clan! Keep in mind: this player had barely even taken a part in our games. He attended a third of session zero and half of session 4. I became resentful about how much time I put into helping him flesh out his character and all the time I had spent to give him as enjoyable as an experience as the other players. So I used my spite to get creative. First off, I decided that his character was dead. Flat out dead. Luckily enough, him and another player had spent the previous session heavily drinking and he left the game before he woke up the next day. I used that as the killing mechanism. I didn't send assassins after him or anything like that, I simply decided that his character died of alcohol poisoning. Since this player would not be returning to game, this made perfect sense to me. In addition to that I also put some more work into other areas of the Xenbox. I went to Town Square and made a post where the guards were called to collect the body of a man that had died of alcohol poisoning. This makes the death of the character public knowledge and could lead to potential rumors in game. In another game I'm building, players own Pokemon gyms and battle each other to compete for badges. Each player gets to customize their gym to make each battle a unique experience. Since I run the Ghost/Dragon gym, I littered the battlefield with the bones of renegade dwarves and orcs (the player who was killed off was a half-orc/half-dwarf). Now I have all sorts of new creative material that makes me happy because it's something that I came up with, and it came from a place of anger. Don't take everything I said too literally, as there are exceptions and limitations to what you can and should do as a DM. Remember that you are running a game for (presumably) your friends, and so if you want to remain friends you need to avoid burning bridges. Category:Blog posts